Pretend your favorite shows are still being made

I have added the 5by5 master audio feed to the list of feeds supported by 5by5 Time Machine. And unlike the feed offered on 5by5.tv, the feed offered on 5by5 Time Machine contains every single 5by5 episode currently available - 2137, as of this post.

Of course, with all these episodes, the amount of data that must be downloaded by the podcast client on every refresh is quite large (~7.5MB). Because of this I have also added a parameter, limit, that you can use to limit the number of episodes returned by the feed to a certain number, always the most recent. This can be used like so:

The above link will return the most recent 50 episodes from the master feed that has been time-shifted by 456 days. If you subscribe to this link, as new episodes get added old ones get moved off the end.

When 5by5 Time Machine was mentioned on The Frequency and The 512 Podcast, both Dan and Myke didn't seem that enthusiastic about the week-long wait times between episodes, as most 5by5 shows have been released on a weekly basis and 5by5 Time Machine simply offsets the times in the feed by a fixed interval.

To remedy that, I'm pleased to announce that 5by5 Time Machine now supports a rate parameter. For example, assuming you wanted a rate of 7 (getting weekly shows daily), you would append ?rate=7 to the end of the URL, like so:

As an aside, the rate parameter is something that I'd planned on adding to 5by5 Time Machine even before the service was launched. However, it proved to be a bit tricky to get the semantics right. Specifically, I wanted to make the behavior of the feed predictable so that users didn't have to mess around with the rate and the offset to get the feed they wanted. To that end, I'd like to take a moment to share how the calculations are made:

The rate parameter determines how much time there should be between a given episode in the feed and the first episode. For example, if the first episode of a show was published January 1, and the second episode on January 10, and the rate is 2, the feed will reposition the second episode to January 5. If the rate is 0.5, the second episode is repositioned to January 20, etc.

Once the rate calculation is done, the number of days to offset the feed is then added. Since the rate affects the resulting date for every episode except the first, it's recommended that you use the first episode to determine what offset you want, then choose the rate.

There is also one final consideration: If you have a rate greater than 1, it's possible to catch up to the live feed at some point. Once this happens, the rate calculation as described above will start adjusting the time backwards from the actual publish date instead of forwards. To prevent this from happening, 5by5 Time Machine will use the actual episode publish date instead of the calculated date in these cases. This means that you can use 5by5 Time Machine to catch up listening to a show, and then continue listening to new episodes as they come out without having to change your feed subscription.

I'm pleased to announce that as of now, After Dark episodes for a show are included in the 5by5 Time Machine feed for that show. Instead of creating new, separate feeds for the combined show + After Dark, I figured that if you're a fan enough of the show to want to relisten to it, you'll probably want the After Dark too. And since creating a separate feed would require people that wanted them to resubscribe to that new feed, I thought it would be a big hassle to put everyone through.

That said, if you really don't want After Dark shows in your show feed, just append ?afterdark=no to the feed URL, like so:

From a technical standpoint, the ?afterdark=no parameter filters out all episodes in a feed that also appear in other shows. For regular shows this filters out episodes that appear in the After Dark feed, but as an added bonus it also filters out episodes in the After Dark feed that appear in other, regular shows:

The above feed returns only standalone After Dark episodes. They're not frequent, but occasionally Dan will post things to the After Dark feed that don't really fit in any other show, and the above link is a great way to subscribe to them. The "0" in the URL means that this feed has no delay, so you'll get the episodes as they come out.

On this week's 512 Podcast (about ~6 minutes in) Myke Hurley and Stephen Hackett discussed going back and listening to old podcasts again, specifically Hypercritical, and how the 5by5 Time Machine makes that easy:

You can create a feed for any 5by5 show that will deliver the episodes weekly from today, as if they are new. [...] I'm not sure if it delivers them weekly, but I assume it does. It provides old episodes on a regular schedule.

Early this morning (around 2AM) I put the finishing touches on the "create feed" page of 5by5 Time Machine that were necessary for public release. Since it was late, I decided to queue up some Twitter posts with Buffer announcing the service to my Twitter followers. The next morning as I drove to work, the posts went out. At first there was not much response, but things really took off when John Siracusa retweeted me.

In the first day there have been nearly a thousand unique IPs that have hit feeds.5by5timemachine.com, which is a great start. I have some new features planned that I'm confident will make the service even better, so watch this space for announcements of them.

Finally, a big "thank you" to everyone that has checked out this service. If you have any feature suggestions or if you've run into a bug, please feel free to drop me a line at kyle.cronin@gmail.com. Thanks!